Maybe she meant that the MPD had been failing the black community by not taking enough violent criminals off the street, and that they should be dismantled and replaced by a new police force that would bring the hammer down.
If this was a problem in the cars they've been making since 2011, I wonder why thefts didn't really start until last year. Apparently the technique was popularized on TikTok, but we had social media before. I thought maybe a cryptographic key had been leaked or something, but apparently the USB cable is used in a purely mechanical manner, like a screwdriver, not to transmit data to the car.
So why did it take thieves a over a decade to figure this out?
This is going to be controversial, but I think it was pretty irresponsible of Hyundai and Kia to embed screens that run web browsers in their steering wheels.
Sure, but as far as I can tell, you were saying that college dropouts were more likely to start their own businesses and strike it rich. You were appealing to outliers, so I showed you the most outlying outliers.
Anyway, the Ramsey survey also found that 88% of millionaires had college degrees.
It says that 80% come from middle- or lower-income families, not from lower-income families. It would be very surprising if 80% came from low-income families, because this would imply that people from low-income families were greatly overrepresented among millionaires, which is implausible given that heredity is a thing. And what is "upper-income?" Top 20? Top 10%? Top 2%? Not defined in the report.
You got the income stats mixed up a bit. Copying and pasting from the actual report's PDF:
Only 31% averaged $100,000 a year over the course of their career, and one third never made six figures in any single working year of their career.
So 2/3 made $100k in at least one year, and 31% averaged that over the course of their entire careers. That's not extraordinarily high, but it's also unclear whether these numbers are adjusted for inflation. If 31% averaged at least $100k in nominal dollars, that's quite a lot of money. But even adjusted to 2017 dollars, far less than 31% of the population average more than $100k over their whole careers.
The claim I'm making here is really very banal, namely that having a higher income makes it easier to build wealth, and that on average, people with higher lifetime incomes will have higher net worth. Do some people build a high net worth despite earning a modest income their whole lives? Sure! Do some people retire in poverty despite earning high wages their whole lives? Sure! But when we're dealing with large groups of people and not individuals, the law of large numbers wins out.
Keep in mind, also, that Dave Ramsey is a finance guru. He has an incentive to spin the results in a way that minimizes the role of salary and maximizes the role that financial savvy plays. I'm not saying he's lying, per se, or that encouraging people to be financially responsible is bad, but the omission of key definitions and methodological details points to some attempts to make income seem like less of a factor than it really is. Note that of the top 5 occupations, teacher is the only one that's not known for salaries that are well above average.
This would be an effective rebuttal to my point if all of the following were true:
1. College graduates in high cost of living cities like San Francisco earned the national average wage for college graduates.
2. High school graduates in lower cost of living cities like Philadelphia earned the national average wage for high school graduates.
3. All college graduates, and only college graduates, lived in cities with the same cots of living as San Francisco.
4. All high school graduates, and only high school graduates, lived in cities with the same cost of living as Philadelphia.
If all of the above were true, then the college wage premium would be entirely canceled out by higher cost of living.
In reality, at most of one those is true, namely 2. People living in high-COL cities tend to have incomes well above the national average for their education level. Many high school graduates live in high-COL cities, and many college graduates live in low-COL cities.
Some portion of the college wage premium is attributable to, and canceled out by, the tendency of college-education workers to live in higher cost-of-living areas than high school graduates. But I think that portion is more like 10-25%, not 100%.
Again, the paper cited as evidence in the NYT article that the college net worth premium will remain low for the 1980s birth cohort does not actually make that claim, and in fact shows that college-educated workers in the 1980s birth cohort are in fact increasing their net worth considerably faster than high-school educated workers in the same birth cohort.
Why are we arguing over the veracity of a claim that was made up out of whole cloth?
I had an uncle who was kind of a piece of crap. He couldn't hold on to a job, and it was always somebody else's fault, as he told it. My father, in a triumph of hope over experience, convinced his boss to hire him. That lasted about as long as the other jobs. He blamed my father---his own brother---and beat him up.
Since my uncle was a straight white man, suing for discrimination wasn't on the table. And we could all just admit that he wasn't a victim, just a jerk.
But contrary to popular belief, people like my uncle come in other sexes and races. And when people of other sexes and races make claims of discrimination, that can cause big problems for their employers. Even if the case is a total baloney sandwich and can't win on the merits, it costs money to make it go away. And employers have to keep an unproductive employee on long enough to establish extensive evidence of grounds for firing. They'll probably have to have regular caste sensitivity training to show that they take caste discrimination seriously. And maybe some caste-based CYAAA.
Anti-discrimination law is not costless, and "discrimination is bad" is not a sufficient justification for incurring the costs of requiring employers to justify their personnel decisions to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and juries. Laws are serious tools for solving real problems, and should not be passed purely for the purpose of moral grandstanding.
According to Forbes, 84% of the Forbes 400 have college degrees, compared to 33% of the general adult population. Even if you account for the fact that some of them inherited their wealth and went to school in part because their parents were already rich, high school graduates are still underrepresented among the wealthiest self-made Americans.
Yes, obviously there are some exceptionally talented people who drop out of or never attend college and then go on to great success, like Bill Gates, but the top x% of college graduates do better than the top x% of high school graduates, for any value of x.
Sure, but we're talking about averaging out millions of people. Past earnings may only be moderately correlated with net worth at the individual level, but when you have a group of millions of people earnings much more money than another group of people earnings millions of people, the first group is definitely going to achieve higher mean and median net worth unless the first group is systematically much, much less inclined to save than the second group, which is very unlikely to be the case.
As I said in my original comment:
Obviously people with high incomes can fail to accumulate wealth if they spend it all and don’t save, but there’s no clear reason to think that’s what’s happening here, since the 1980s cohort was, after all, able to pay off student loans and achieve a small wealth premium over high school graduates in the first several years after graduation.
In fact, the college graduates among the 1980s cohort show a clear pattern of faster wealth-building than the high school graduates. Not only did they start with negative net worth, but they averaged only 7-8 years in the workforce instead of the 12 the high school graduates had, yet they were still able to catch up and surpass the high school graduates in terms of net worth by 2016. Reasonable extrapolation from this trend points to an increase in the net worth premium for the 1980s birth cohort.
Note that this paper was written in 2019, and the Survey of Consumer Finances is conducted only once every three years, so it's based on 2016 data. The average college graduate born the 1980s would have been been born at the beginning of 1985, graduated from college in 2007 or 2008, right as the Great Recession was getting started, and then had about eight years---the first five or so in very poor economic conditions---to pay off student loans and start building positive net worth.
and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.
I think this is an error on the part of Tough, the NYT journalist; I don't see this mentioned anywhere in the linked paper, and it doesn't make any sense. Why would a large wage premium not translate to a large wealth premium later in life? The small wealth premium early in life is likely attributable to a lower intercept (i.e. younger cohorts start with more highly negative net worth because of larger student loans), but as long as the college wage premium remains high, the slope should remain high, and in the long run the lower intercept should have only a small effect on the wealth premium.
Obviously people with high incomes can fail to accumulate wealth if they spend it all and don't save, but there's no clear reason to think that's what's happening here, since the 1980s cohort was, after all, able to pay off student loans and achieve a small wealth premium over high school graduates in the first several years after graduation.
The 2019 SCF did a lot to dispel the "Millennials so poor" narrative that had been building over the past decade, as this was the survey year when the average net worth of Millennials was finally found to have surpassed that of Boomers at the same age. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any research where the same age x education crosstab done here has been done with the 2019 data, but I suspect that it would show a substantial increase in the college wealth premium for the 1980s cohort. And the 2022 SCF data should be coming out soonish.
It's a shame, because there's a very real problem with left-wing charlatanism, conformism, and lack of rigor in academia, and the rot is spreading to public schools. We desperately need a critical mass of non-stupid pushback against it, but mostly we get hysterical overreactions. The route between Scylla and Charybdis is getting narrower and more treacherous with each passing year.
I get that economic despair is obviously at the root of all drug abuse, because the alternative is that sometimes people make bad choices that can't be blamed on richer people, which is just absurd, but in point of fact Sauk County seems to be doing okay economically.
I think it's happened in Singapore a couple of times, and it was much more common under the gold standard, since money supply growth was slow and irregular. But my main point was just that people being unwilling to spend due to anticipation of lower prices in the future is not the actual reason that deflation is associated with recessions.
Well the rub here is that prices going down across the board, aka deflation, is typically an economic catastrophe. People (and businesses) put off buying and investing until later hoping prices will continue to decline.
As far as I can tell, this is just folk economics, and the actual reason deflation is associated with recessions that nowadays it's almost always demand-side deflation, i.e. caused by a contraction in nominal spending. A contraction in nominal spending is bad because it leads to falling nominal incomes, which means that a lot of people won't be able to meet relatively fixed financial obligations like rent and payroll. This leads to some businesses having to do layoffs, cut wages, or shut down, which exacerbates the decline in nominal spending.
While we rarely see it at an economy-wide in modern times, I believe that historical evidence points to supply-side deflation---where productivity grows so fast that prices fall despite increases in nominal spending---being fairly benign. At a microeconomic level, we don't generally see rapidly falling prices for particular classes of goods and services---e.g. with computers and electronics---being particularly damaging to those industries.
I compared 2017-2019 to 2020-2022, adjusting for population, and got this:
Homicide: Up 20%
Burglary: Up 41%
Car Theft: Up 42%
Arson: Up 34%
Rape: Down 42%
Robbery: Down 22%
Assault: Down 3%
Larceny: Down 24%
The general pattern I see is fewer crimes involving confrontations, and more non-confrontational/stealth crimes, both plausibly attributable to more people staying home. It would be interesting to know if the increase in burglaries was mostly homes or businesses. Based on the fact that more people were staying home, I assume that there was a decrease in home burglaries and increase in business burglaries, but I don't have the data to confirm this.
Homicide doesn't fit the pattern, but we're talking about a total of 18 more homicides in 2020-2022 compared to the prior three years. San Francisco's homicide rate, by the way, is roughly equal to the national average, but it's quite a bit higher than would be expected based on its demographics.
Larceny's the other exception. I'm not really sure what's going on there. I would expect it to follow the stealth crime pattern, but it's following the same pattern as the confrontational crimes. There was a huge decline in 2020, and it's been creeping back up since then. But I'm assuming that the modal larceny incident is shoplifting, and maybe that's not right.
What does this mean? Like, pick your favorite right, and explain what it means for that right to exist as a matter of objective fact, rather than subjective preference.
We’re going to start having a problem when enough people start saying “My degree was *NOT* worth what I paid for it.”
We're moving in the opposite direction. Once again, I refer you all to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid report. Note Figure CP-9. Inflation-adjusted net (i.e. what students actually pay) tuition and fees for 4-year public universities peaked a decade ago at $4,060 (in 2022 dollars), was down to $3,130 in 2019, and was projected to be down to $2,250 last year. With room and board, it's $14,560, but housing is expensive, and you need to pay for that whether you got to college or not.
Figure CP-13: Public universities get $15,150 in revenue per undergrad student, only 40% of which comes from tuition. SA-1: Loans trending sharply down for the past decade, grants going up, up, up for two decades. That chart specifically says federal loans, but SA-2 shows that undergraduate educations are increasingly funded by grants rather than loans. SA-6: Aggregate loans issued have been declining for over a decade. SA-9B: Average annual loan per undergrad is $6,440 per year, and down from 10 years ago.
SA-14A: Only 54% of 4-year graduates from public and private non-profit universities take out any loans at all, and for those 54% only, the average debt is $29,100. Note that both the percentage and the average are down from 2010-11, after adjusting for inflation. It does say that Parent PLUS loans are not included, but those are a small share of all loans, and they are also trending down over the past decade (SA-1).
You know what else is about $30,000? The college wage premium. The median full-time worker with a bachelor's degree made $1,334 per week in 2021, $525 more than the median high school graduate. 52 * $525 is $27,300.
And with income-driven repayment, a lot of those loans are never paid back in full. It's commonly claimed that student loans are "predatory," and for undergrad loans that's actually true, but the prey are taxpayers, not borrowers.
This whole narrative we're being fed about skyrocketing college costs and how you need to take out six-figure loans to have a chance at being in the middle class has no basis in fact. It's lies, lies, lies. The vast majority of student loans are manageable, with servicing costs being a small and shrinking fraction of the college wage premium. This is a totally reasonable sum to require college students to contribute to the cost of their educations. This just isn't a real issue. People want their loans cancelled because people like getting free money, not because they legitimately got a raw deal.
An important caveat here is that a lot of Master's programs actually are kind of scammy and not subsidized like undergrad degrees are, and as a result they sometimes are not worth the much larger loans you have to take out to get them. But the takeaway here is that you shouldn't get a master's degree unless you have a realistic plan to make it pay off, not that college is a bad deal or that a huge giveaway to student loan borrowers is warranted.
Also, this is not to say that universities aren't spending too much money, just that undergrad students aren't the ones funding it.
This kind of concern trolling falls flat because lefties have a totally nonsensical idea of what individual liberty means. It's like when you think freedom of speech means that teachers should have an individual right to teach whatever they want, on the clock, at taxpayer expense, to a captive audience of children who are legally required to attend. You're just saying words without any real understanding of what they mean.
I think that there's a pretty broad, bipartisan agreement that a man entering a women's bathroom is a violation of a reasonable social convention, and that it's totally legitimate for an employer to fire a man who repeatedly does this at his workplace after being explicitly instructed not to. We all agree that this is not an infringement on individual liberty, right?
"But trans women are women!"
Sure, fine. But just acknowledge that that's the actual point of contention. This isn't about the government telling private businesses how they have to manage their bathrooms. It's not about the government sending people people to prison. It's government setting rules for how government employees should behave in the workplace, and enforcing those rules with disciplinary measures maxing out at termination. Almost nobody has any objection to any part of this except the part about prioritizing sex over self-identified gender.
I see this kind of thing all the time. People routinely grossly misrepresent the actual point of contention in policy disputes. Why can't people just be honest about what we're disagreeing about? Why the bad-faith insistence that it's actually about something completely different?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Mini-Throughput: Masks, Redux”
Forty million Iranian men can't be wrong!
On “Shivanthi Sathanandan posts to Facebook that she has been Carjacked”
Maybe she meant that the MPD had been failing the black community by not taking enough violent criminals off the street, and that they should be dismantled and replaced by a new police force that would bring the hammer down.
On “Chrome & Punishment”
If this was a problem in the cars they've been making since 2011, I wonder why thefts didn't really start until last year. Apparently the technique was popularized on TikTok, but we had social media before. I thought maybe a cryptographic key had been leaked or something, but apparently the USB cable is used in a purely mechanical manner, like a screwdriver, not to transmit data to the car.
So why did it take thieves a over a decade to figure this out?
"
This is going to be controversial, but I think it was pretty irresponsible of Hyundai and Kia to embed screens that run web browsers in their steering wheels.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/28/2023”
Sure, but as far as I can tell, you were saying that college dropouts were more likely to start their own businesses and strike it rich. You were appealing to outliers, so I showed you the most outlying outliers.
Anyway, the Ramsey survey also found that 88% of millionaires had college degrees.
It says that 80% come from middle- or lower-income families, not from lower-income families. It would be very surprising if 80% came from low-income families, because this would imply that people from low-income families were greatly overrepresented among millionaires, which is implausible given that heredity is a thing. And what is "upper-income?" Top 20? Top 10%? Top 2%? Not defined in the report.
You got the income stats mixed up a bit. Copying and pasting from the actual report's PDF:
So 2/3 made $100k in at least one year, and 31% averaged that over the course of their entire careers. That's not extraordinarily high, but it's also unclear whether these numbers are adjusted for inflation. If 31% averaged at least $100k in nominal dollars, that's quite a lot of money. But even adjusted to 2017 dollars, far less than 31% of the population average more than $100k over their whole careers.
The claim I'm making here is really very banal, namely that having a higher income makes it easier to build wealth, and that on average, people with higher lifetime incomes will have higher net worth. Do some people build a high net worth despite earning a modest income their whole lives? Sure! Do some people retire in poverty despite earning high wages their whole lives? Sure! But when we're dealing with large groups of people and not individuals, the law of large numbers wins out.
Keep in mind, also, that Dave Ramsey is a finance guru. He has an incentive to spin the results in a way that minimizes the role of salary and maximizes the role that financial savvy plays. I'm not saying he's lying, per se, or that encouraging people to be financially responsible is bad, but the omission of key definitions and methodological details points to some attempts to make income seem like less of a factor than it really is. Note that of the top 5 occupations, teacher is the only one that's not known for salaries that are well above average.
"
This would be an effective rebuttal to my point if all of the following were true:
1. College graduates in high cost of living cities like San Francisco earned the national average wage for college graduates.
2. High school graduates in lower cost of living cities like Philadelphia earned the national average wage for high school graduates.
3. All college graduates, and only college graduates, lived in cities with the same cots of living as San Francisco.
4. All high school graduates, and only high school graduates, lived in cities with the same cost of living as Philadelphia.
If all of the above were true, then the college wage premium would be entirely canceled out by higher cost of living.
In reality, at most of one those is true, namely 2. People living in high-COL cities tend to have incomes well above the national average for their education level. Many high school graduates live in high-COL cities, and many college graduates live in low-COL cities.
Some portion of the college wage premium is attributable to, and canceled out by, the tendency of college-education workers to live in higher cost-of-living areas than high school graduates. But I think that portion is more like 10-25%, not 100%.
Again, the paper cited as evidence in the NYT article that the college net worth premium will remain low for the 1980s birth cohort does not actually make that claim, and in fact shows that college-educated workers in the 1980s birth cohort are in fact increasing their net worth considerably faster than high-school educated workers in the same birth cohort.
Why are we arguing over the veracity of a claim that was made up out of whole cloth?
On “From Politico: An effort to ban caste discrimination in California has touched a nerve”
I had an uncle who was kind of a piece of crap. He couldn't hold on to a job, and it was always somebody else's fault, as he told it. My father, in a triumph of hope over experience, convinced his boss to hire him. That lasted about as long as the other jobs. He blamed my father---his own brother---and beat him up.
Since my uncle was a straight white man, suing for discrimination wasn't on the table. And we could all just admit that he wasn't a victim, just a jerk.
But contrary to popular belief, people like my uncle come in other sexes and races. And when people of other sexes and races make claims of discrimination, that can cause big problems for their employers. Even if the case is a total baloney sandwich and can't win on the merits, it costs money to make it go away. And employers have to keep an unproductive employee on long enough to establish extensive evidence of grounds for firing. They'll probably have to have regular caste sensitivity training to show that they take caste discrimination seriously. And maybe some caste-based CYAAA.
Anti-discrimination law is not costless, and "discrimination is bad" is not a sufficient justification for incurring the costs of requiring employers to justify their personnel decisions to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and juries. Laws are serious tools for solving real problems, and should not be passed purely for the purpose of moral grandstanding.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/28/2023”
According to Forbes, 84% of the Forbes 400 have college degrees, compared to 33% of the general adult population. Even if you account for the fact that some of them inherited their wealth and went to school in part because their parents were already rich, high school graduates are still underrepresented among the wealthiest self-made Americans.
Yes, obviously there are some exceptionally talented people who drop out of or never attend college and then go on to great success, like Bill Gates, but the top x% of college graduates do better than the top x% of high school graduates, for any value of x.
"
Again, the economists who wrote the paper didn't claim this---it appears to be a misunderstanding by the author of the NYT Magazine article.
"
Sure, but we're talking about averaging out millions of people. Past earnings may only be moderately correlated with net worth at the individual level, but when you have a group of millions of people earnings much more money than another group of people earnings millions of people, the first group is definitely going to achieve higher mean and median net worth unless the first group is systematically much, much less inclined to save than the second group, which is very unlikely to be the case.
As I said in my original comment:
"
High school graduates also have to pay rent.
"
In fact, the college graduates among the 1980s cohort show a clear pattern of faster wealth-building than the high school graduates. Not only did they start with negative net worth, but they averaged only 7-8 years in the workforce instead of the 12 the high school graduates had, yet they were still able to catch up and surpass the high school graduates in terms of net worth by 2016. Reasonable extrapolation from this trend points to an increase in the net worth premium for the 1980s birth cohort.
Journos, man. When will they learn?
"
Note that this paper was written in 2019, and the Survey of Consumer Finances is conducted only once every three years, so it's based on 2016 data. The average college graduate born the 1980s would have been been born at the beginning of 1985, graduated from college in 2007 or 2008, right as the Great Recession was getting started, and then had about eight years---the first five or so in very poor economic conditions---to pay off student loans and start building positive net worth.
I think this is an error on the part of Tough, the NYT journalist; I don't see this mentioned anywhere in the linked paper, and it doesn't make any sense. Why would a large wage premium not translate to a large wealth premium later in life? The small wealth premium early in life is likely attributable to a lower intercept (i.e. younger cohorts start with more highly negative net worth because of larger student loans), but as long as the college wage premium remains high, the slope should remain high, and in the long run the lower intercept should have only a small effect on the wealth premium.
Obviously people with high incomes can fail to accumulate wealth if they spend it all and don't save, but there's no clear reason to think that's what's happening here, since the 1980s cohort was, after all, able to pay off student loans and achieve a small wealth premium over high school graduates in the first several years after graduation.
The 2019 SCF did a lot to dispel the "Millennials so poor" narrative that had been building over the past decade, as this was the survey year when the average net worth of Millennials was finally found to have surpassed that of Boomers at the same age. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any research where the same age x education crosstab done here has been done with the 2019 data, but I suspect that it would show a substantial increase in the college wealth premium for the 1980s cohort. And the 2022 SCF data should be coming out soonish.
"
I propose a pact wherein we all agree not to make the obvious play on a Jimmy Buffett song title here.
"
It's a shame, because there's a very real problem with left-wing charlatanism, conformism, and lack of rigor in academia, and the rot is spreading to public schools. We desperately need a critical mass of non-stupid pushback against it, but mostly we get hysterical overreactions. The route between Scylla and Charybdis is getting narrower and more treacherous with each passing year.
"
I get that economic despair is obviously at the root of all drug abuse, because the alternative is that sometimes people make bad choices that can't be blamed on richer people, which is just absurd, but in point of fact Sauk County seems to be doing okay economically.
On “How to Make People Care About Democratic Achievements”
Especially Brandon. I've been beating the voter ignorance drum since long before it was cool. I'm a hipster for elitism.
"
I think it's happened in Singapore a couple of times, and it was much more common under the gold standard, since money supply growth was slow and irregular. But my main point was just that people being unwilling to spend due to anticipation of lower prices in the future is not the actual reason that deflation is associated with recessions.
"
As far as I can tell, this is just folk economics, and the actual reason deflation is associated with recessions that nowadays it's almost always demand-side deflation, i.e. caused by a contraction in nominal spending. A contraction in nominal spending is bad because it leads to falling nominal incomes, which means that a lot of people won't be able to meet relatively fixed financial obligations like rent and payroll. This leads to some businesses having to do layoffs, cut wages, or shut down, which exacerbates the decline in nominal spending.
While we rarely see it at an economy-wide in modern times, I believe that historical evidence points to supply-side deflation---where productivity grows so fast that prices fall despite increases in nominal spending---being fairly benign. At a microeconomic level, we don't generally see rapidly falling prices for particular classes of goods and services---e.g. with computers and electronics---being particularly damaging to those industries.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/28/2023”
I compared 2017-2019 to 2020-2022, adjusting for population, and got this:
Homicide: Up 20%
Burglary: Up 41%
Car Theft: Up 42%
Arson: Up 34%
Rape: Down 42%
Robbery: Down 22%
Assault: Down 3%
Larceny: Down 24%
The general pattern I see is fewer crimes involving confrontations, and more non-confrontational/stealth crimes, both plausibly attributable to more people staying home. It would be interesting to know if the increase in burglaries was mostly homes or businesses. Based on the fact that more people were staying home, I assume that there was a decrease in home burglaries and increase in business burglaries, but I don't have the data to confirm this.
Homicide doesn't fit the pattern, but we're talking about a total of 18 more homicides in 2020-2022 compared to the prior three years. San Francisco's homicide rate, by the way, is roughly equal to the national average, but it's quite a bit higher than would be expected based on its demographics.
Larceny's the other exception. I'm not really sure what's going on there. I would expect it to follow the stealth crime pattern, but it's following the same pattern as the confrontational crimes. There was a huge decline in 2020, and it's been creeping back up since then. But I'm assuming that the modal larceny incident is shoplifting, and maybe that's not right.
"
What does this mean? Like, pick your favorite right, and explain what it means for that right to exist as a matter of objective fact, rather than subjective preference.
On “The Maleficent Gordon Gee and His Malfunctioning Money Machine”
We're moving in the opposite direction. Once again, I refer you all to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid report. Note Figure CP-9. Inflation-adjusted net (i.e. what students actually pay) tuition and fees for 4-year public universities peaked a decade ago at $4,060 (in 2022 dollars), was down to $3,130 in 2019, and was projected to be down to $2,250 last year. With room and board, it's $14,560, but housing is expensive, and you need to pay for that whether you got to college or not.
Figure CP-13: Public universities get $15,150 in revenue per undergrad student, only 40% of which comes from tuition. SA-1: Loans trending sharply down for the past decade, grants going up, up, up for two decades. That chart specifically says federal loans, but SA-2 shows that undergraduate educations are increasingly funded by grants rather than loans. SA-6: Aggregate loans issued have been declining for over a decade. SA-9B: Average annual loan per undergrad is $6,440 per year, and down from 10 years ago.
SA-14A: Only 54% of 4-year graduates from public and private non-profit universities take out any loans at all, and for those 54% only, the average debt is $29,100. Note that both the percentage and the average are down from 2010-11, after adjusting for inflation. It does say that Parent PLUS loans are not included, but those are a small share of all loans, and they are also trending down over the past decade (SA-1).
You know what else is about $30,000? The college wage premium. The median full-time worker with a bachelor's degree made $1,334 per week in 2021, $525 more than the median high school graduate. 52 * $525 is $27,300.
And with income-driven repayment, a lot of those loans are never paid back in full. It's commonly claimed that student loans are "predatory," and for undergrad loans that's actually true, but the prey are taxpayers, not borrowers.
This whole narrative we're being fed about skyrocketing college costs and how you need to take out six-figure loans to have a chance at being in the middle class has no basis in fact. It's lies, lies, lies. The vast majority of student loans are manageable, with servicing costs being a small and shrinking fraction of the college wage premium. This is a totally reasonable sum to require college students to contribute to the cost of their educations. This just isn't a real issue. People want their loans cancelled because people like getting free money, not because they legitimately got a raw deal.
An important caveat here is that a lot of Master's programs actually are kind of scammy and not subsidized like undergrad degrees are, and as a result they sometimes are not worth the much larger loans you have to take out to get them. But the takeaway here is that you shouldn't get a master's degree unless you have a realistic plan to make it pay off, not that college is a bad deal or that a huge giveaway to student loan borrowers is warranted.
Also, this is not to say that universities aren't spending too much money, just that undergrad students aren't the ones funding it.
On “Only a Dream”
I'm not following.
"
4 bits is 50 cents. Originally a bit was one piece of a Spanish dollar that had been cut into eight pieces. Hence "pieces of eight."
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/21/2023”
This kind of concern trolling falls flat because lefties have a totally nonsensical idea of what individual liberty means. It's like when you think freedom of speech means that teachers should have an individual right to teach whatever they want, on the clock, at taxpayer expense, to a captive audience of children who are legally required to attend. You're just saying words without any real understanding of what they mean.
I think that there's a pretty broad, bipartisan agreement that a man entering a women's bathroom is a violation of a reasonable social convention, and that it's totally legitimate for an employer to fire a man who repeatedly does this at his workplace after being explicitly instructed not to. We all agree that this is not an infringement on individual liberty, right?
"But trans women are women!"
Sure, fine. But just acknowledge that that's the actual point of contention. This isn't about the government telling private businesses how they have to manage their bathrooms. It's not about the government sending people people to prison. It's government setting rules for how government employees should behave in the workplace, and enforcing those rules with disciplinary measures maxing out at termination. Almost nobody has any objection to any part of this except the part about prioritizing sex over self-identified gender.
I see this kind of thing all the time. People routinely grossly misrepresent the actual point of contention in policy disputes. Why can't people just be honest about what we're disagreeing about? Why the bad-faith insistence that it's actually about something completely different?
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